First time blogger sharing the trials and tribulations of being a stay at home father. Some humour will be tried, often badly. Enjoy. Follow. Comment. Fall in love with my children and offer to take them for a weekend so I can get a break. (kidding, ......... or am I???) You have been warned. The sarcasm flows freely here.

Friday, March 7, 2014

First off I would like to state that my personal beliefs have no bear on the Stand Your Ground law stories that have been in the news recently. If I make a humorous statement about the case or the person(s) involved, it is just for the sake of a laugh. This is just another thought from a parent's standpoint.

The other night I made a wonderful (or so I thought) dinner. The other parental unit as well as the younger of the offspring thought so. However the eldest child was not in the same Praise Camp. To her it was "messy and disgusting looking," and "It tastes repulsive." All while not even trying a tiny bit of it. How does one know if a meal is repulsive tasting if one does not even put a single bite in their mouth is beyond me. We all ate our respective meals while the newest hunger strike member campaigned for a new meal. Over cries, tears, yelling, gagging, and defiance. We calmly said that this is dinner and there will be nothing else to eat for the duration of the night. I do a great deal around the house. I cook. I do laundry. I clean. I make meals. ONE meal per sitting. I am not a personal chef; I don't get paid enough. We all eat the same meal. If you don't like it, you don't eat. (I know some of my grandparent readers will say "Just give her her own meal. You can't not feed her." But it is not my job to be at the beacon call of their culinary desires. It is the grandparent's job to do that.)

Kids won't starve. If my children had a food allergy or some sort of dietary restriction, then I will make a special dish for them. Most likely we would all eat the same meal with consideration made to said restriction. That being said, my kids have neither. They aren't even picky eaters (aside from this instance). Needless to say she had a few bites and went to bed. I'm sure the food-borne tantrum was directly related to the fact that she was tired. Do you know what happened the next morning? She woke up. She didn't starve because she didn't have dinner. She didn't turn into a pile of dust during the night. She woke up and had breakfast, just like any other day.

Back to Stand Your Ground. What I am proposing is that parents should not be looked down upon for malnutrition if their child doesn't eat a single meal. It is just one meal. The parents should not be forced to make a new meal just to please one child. We work hard and the last thing we need is to make more work for us. Again, kids won't starve. The meal put before them is the meal. Eat it or don't. Their choice. Parents, stand your ground. You work hard doing your jobs plus all of the other parental things you do. Don't make more work for yourselves.

Maybe Mr. Zimmerman was just trying to get Mr. Martin to eat his meal. Maybe he didn't eat the fish or the broccoli or the flafel. Even if that were the case, I am not saying we should all injure (or worse) our children if they refuse to eat the meal of the night. Remind them that One Meal, One Sitting is the law of the land. Unless that is, if you live in Florida. Then all bets are off.